Implementing Authentic Assessment through Speaking Club at UIN Sunan Ampel Surabaya

In recent years, authentic assessment has become a must since assessing students’ competencies is not only conducted by a test, but also by understanding the students’ progress in a learning process, specifically English language. This study focuses on the implementation of an authentic assessment through a speaking club and the challenges faced by the lecturer in implementing an authentic assessment through a speaking club. This present study, therefore, is undertaken through a descriptive qualitative research design. The researcher involved 1 lecturer of Spoken English course, A class, to obtain the data through the interview. As well, a classroom observation was also conducted in Spoken English course, A class, during the speaking club at UIN Sunan Ampel Surabaya. The finding of this study revealed that the lecturer conducted an authentic assessment through performance assessment represented in roles and sections of the speaking club. Furthermore, the lecturer involved topics that were adopted from the IELTS Speaking Test and used the rubric from IELTS Speaking Band Descriptors as the guidelines to assess students’ speaking ability in speaking club without any modification, then only transformed the score into the format from the university obligation. The evaluation in the speaking club was also conducted by the Evaluator and Grammarian which were taken by the students in the classroom. The assessment itself only focused on the second section. Lastly, the lecturer found many challenges in implementing authentic assessment through the speaking club which kept students motivated in speaking, providing feedback for students, managing time to provide feedback, and monitoring students’ progress. Therefore, a speaking club is a great recommendation to be an authentic assessment to other speaking classes in the future.